stuff

["Walter Lake" <wlake@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for your emails

Learning Access has really helped me re-think a lot of my programming in
Excel.

If you look at the two user interfaces, you can see the immediate difference
between them. In Excel, you have this "big nothing" which you create stuff
in. Whereas in Access, you are presented with a dialog box with six tabs:
Tables (database info), Queries, Forms, Reports, Macros and (Code) Modules.

This "up front" organization is really helpful to me. In Excel you have to
remember all of these possibilities. It always ends up when developing an
app, that I mutter to myself, "oh ... I should have used a form", etc. In
Access it right there "in your face".

The following links "Handy Page" is very comprehensive

  http://www.home.earthlink.net/~jmhla/handypag.htm

I found it difficult to locate sample databases to learn ideas from. The
Northwind sample and solver provided with Access are very good. However, the
following 35 databases demonstrate many techniques, with of course, easy
access to the code and forms etc.

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~jmhla/RogerLib.EXE

    "The file contains 33 databases, each of which
     demonstrates a possible solution to a single problem. The examples
range from
     Beginner to Expert in difficulty. Also included in the file is a Table
Of Contents
     which describes each of the samples. The purpose of the samples is to
     demonstrate a possible solution, not to present the user with a robust
     utility.

I hope that the next version of Excel incorporates the Access dialog box
because it sure makes app development much easier. However, one of the
traders mentioned that the big push in Office 2002 or whatever it is to be
called, will be voice recognition.

Best regards

Walter